Science journalism losing vets

So I’m listening to a science journalists’ book about how adults have basically shunned or ignored science from their lives, and then I run across a story like this:

We just received word from Mike Lafferty, science editor at the Columbus Dispatch and honcho for one of the more industrious mid-pub science sections in the nation, that he has accepted a buyout to those over age 55 with 15 years on the job. (Put “Lafferty” in this site’s search box and get 20 posts that include his stuff). It’s been a drip drip drip of such things lately.

At the AAAS meeting in San Francisco I was dismayed to learn that Bryn Nelson at Newsday also is taking a buyout, and that Time Magazine’s Mike Lemonick has gone solo too (although he, like co-former-Time sci writer Madeleine Nash, will continue writing for the pub as an outside contributor). I, bought out under duress by USNews a short few years back, was hanging around in the AAAS press room without much to do. So was former Dallas Morning News science editor Tom Siegfried. Earl Lane, former Newsday science writer, was at work: staffing the place. Gad. As it is, only about 4 percent of National Assoc. of Science Writers are newspaper or newsmagazine reporters or editors. I’d guess that’s half the percentage of 20 years ago. Science sections, according to Cris Russell (ret’d Wash. Post, now at Harvard’s Shorenstein Center) have dropped from 95 in 1989 to around 40 today and many carry little beyond medical and consumer health reporting.

Yoiks! And I thought book review sections were getting it bad. What is troubling is taking this into account in light of the professor quotes in Natalie Angier’s book “The Canon” that we are in a time of revolutionary science and technological change that is similar to the change that literacy brought about.

Michael Janairo

One Response

Thank you for remarking and re-posting the item. I sense the parallel between my business — science writing — and book review sections. I must add a correction however. I put up the post and, as with too much bloggerizing, made a small but careless error. Mike Lafferty is a veteran science writer but not the science editor at the paper he is leaving. I received to my chagrin a polite email from the actual science editor putting me straight. More interesting is that this item, a reflection of the personal impacts of mainstream media’s so-far fruitless search for a business model that works and that preserves investigative reporting and freedom, got such extensive and gratifying reaction. It has better legs by far than any other post on the site’s topic (science journalism’s daily output).

Note: The Times Union is not responsible for posts and comments written by non-staff members.

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